“Ali Liebegott’s epic train trip across America.”

Check out this feature over at The Believer, which follows Ali Liebgott’s train trip across America:

Once a month over the next year, we’ll be posting the tale of poet Ali Liebegott’s epic train trip across America. Destination: the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, MA. Along the way, she stopped and spoke with female writers (mostly poets) about art and writing and life. It’s these conversations we’ll be posting. Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Sarah Bynum, Eileen Myles… we’re excited to bring you all of them. But the journey begins in a tattoo shop…

She begins:

I waited ten years to get an Emily Dickinson tattoo because when I was twenty-seven getting roses inked across my chest in a Brooklyn shop, I watched the guy next to me get three different photographic faces tattooed on his forearm, one sitting on top of the other like a totem-pole. One of the heads was bald. Then it clicked. “Really?” I thought, “You’re getting the Three Stooges tattooed on your arm?” But people get all sorts of things tattooed on them. They get an arm-length syringe filled with Rockstar energy drink plunging into their vein, or a necklace of dicks, or once in a magazine I saw this guy, probably not even thirty, who had his entire chest tattooed as a rainbow pastel vagina. What could’ve happened so young in his life that he’d want his entire chest to be permanently covered in a pastel-vagina? Some questions only God can answer.

After my roses were finished, I walked past the guy getting the Three Stooges tattoo and gave him the tattoo solidarity smile.

“Three Stooges!” I said, putting my arms over my head in a victory salute.